Think Again

SAFE AT HOME GATES
When I first arrived at the Gates Foundation, people were whispering about
the annual strategy reviews. It’s the time when program teams across the
foundation meet with the cochairs—Bill and Melinda Gates—and the CEO
to give progress reports on execution and collect feedback. Although the
foundation employs some of the world’s leading experts in areas ranging
from eradicating disease to promoting educational equity, these experts are
often intimidated by Bill’s knowledge base, which seems impossibly broad
and deep. What if he spots a fatal flaw in my work? Will it be the end of my
career here?
A few years ago, leaders at the Gates Foundation reached out to see if I
could help them build psychological safety. They were worried that the
pressure to present airtight analyses was discouraging people from taking
risks. They often stuck to tried-and-true strategies that would make
incremental progress rather than daring to undertake bold experiments that
might make a bigger dent in some of the world’s most vexing problems.
The existing evidence on creating psychological safety gave us some
starting points. I knew that changing the culture of an entire organization is
daunting, while changing the culture of a team is more feasible. It starts
with modeling the values we want to promote, identifying and praising
others who exemplify them, and building a coalition of colleagues who are
committed to making the change.
The standard advice for managers on building psychological safety is
to model openness and inclusiveness. Ask for feedback on how you can
improve, and people will feel safe to take risks. To test whether that
recommendation would work, I launched an experiment with a doctoral

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student, Constantinos Coutifaris. In multiple companies, we randomly
assigned some managers to ask their teams for constructive criticism. Over
the following week, their teams reported higher psychological safety, but as
we anticipated, it didn’t last. Some managers who asked for feedback didn’t
like what they heard and got defensive. Others found the feedback useless
or felt helpless to act on it, which discouraged them from continuing to seek
feedback and their teams from continuing to offer it.
Another group of managers took a different approach, one that had less
immediate impact in the first week but led to sustainable gains in
psychological safety a full year later. Instead of asking them to seek
feedback, we had randomly assigned those managers to share their past
experiences with receiving feedback and their future development goals.
We advised them to tell their teams about a time when they benefited from
constructive criticism and to identify the areas that they were working to
improve now.
By admitting some of their imperfections out loud, managers
demonstrated that they could take it—and made a public commitment to
remain open to feedback. They normalized vulnerability, making their
teams more comfortable opening up about their own struggles. Their
employees gave more useful feedback because they knew where their
managers were working to grow. That motivated managers to create
practices to keep the door open: they started holding “ask me anything”
coffee chats, opening weekly one-on-one meetings by asking for
constructive criticism, and setting up monthly team sessions where
everyone shared their development goals and progress.
Creating psychological safety can’t be an isolated episode or a task to
check off on a to-do list. When discussing their weaknesses, many of the
managers in our experiment felt awkward and anxious at first. Many of
their team members were surprised by that vulnerability and unsure of how
to respond. Some were skeptical: they thought their managers might be
fishing for compliments or cherry-picking comments that made them look
good. It was only over time—as managers repeatedly demonstrated
humility and curiosity—that the dynamic changed.
At the Gates Foundation, I wanted to go a step further. Instead of just
having managers open up with their own teams about how they had
previously been criticized, I wondered what would happen if senior leaders

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shared their experiences across the entire organization. It dawned on me
that I had a memorable way to make that happen.
A few years earlier, our MBA students at Wharton decided to create a
video for their annual comedy show. It was inspired by “Mean Tweets,” the
late-night segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in which celebrities read cruel
tweets about themselves out loud. Our version was Mean Reviews, where
faculty members read harsh comments from student course evaluations.
“This is possibly the worst class I’ve ever taken in my life,” one professor
read, looking defeated before saying, “Fair enough.” Another read, “This
professor is a b*tch. But she’s a nice b*tch,” adding with chagrin: “That’s
sweet.” One of my own was “You remind me of a Muppet.” The kicker
belonged to a junior faculty member: “Prof acts all down with pop culture,
but secretly thinks Ariana Grande is a font in Microsoft Word.”
I made it a habit to show that video in class every fall, and afterward
the floodgates would open. Students seemed to be more comfortable
sharing their criticisms and suggestions for improvement after seeing that
although I take my work seriously, I don’t take myself too seriously.
I sent the video to Melinda Gates, asking if she thought something
similar might help with psychological safety in her organization. She not
only said yes; she challenged the entire executive leadership team to